What’s could be worse than dodging diseased co-workers refusing to remove their plague-addled selves from one’s presence, insisting on following some primal desperate need for companionship while festering with disgusting viral infections, preferably all over my desk? Out, OUT I say, you vile thing. Or hordes of filthy, sniffling children and lung-coughing-upping pensioners infesting our public transportation and insisting on spreading their foul effluvient illness all over the poor, harried folk trying desperately to remain hale and healthy for their upcoming holidays.
Honestly, I can think of several less optimal fates than being ill at the onset of vacation. After all, what’s a little wheezing death flu, when the world is wracked by plague, war, economic despair, republicans and daytime television? There must be a philosophical framework somewhere that classifies adversity by relative, rather than absolute seriousness — no, I’m not a starving Congolese orphan, but dammit, we’re out of corn flakes, I could just cry…
Then, a brief discourse on the function of France. I have a bit of an informal contest running with Karin; since moving to France, she has experienced a constant run of bad luck with the logistical workings of France and its French things. Identity cards, registrations, taxes, strikes, and anything that requires some sort of faith in the functioning of a system when one attempts to follow bureaucratically imposed rules in order to make a go of it in a given country, these have all just…failed. Meanwhile, I have breezed through most of my interactions with banks, bus passes, transportation, garage accommodations, what-have-you, with an unfair ease. So, since her last trip with Air France was a technological nightmare (horrid food, broken entertainment system, and a general lack of pleasantness, we thought we’d see whether I could expose the cheerful France-yang to her grim France-yin (my last Air France flight 10 years ago involved champagne, foie gras and a night-time descent across Paris…)
(Excuse me, please. Sound technician, can you please cue the ominous horror-movie chord now? Thank you.)
*Dun-dun-DUNNNNNN*
Thus, the utterly self-serving whiny relativity of personal misery taken into account, there is no nastier outcome to this than, having survived the barrage of germinology launched by wheezing hordes of putrescent zombies, each pathologically determined to launch his clouds of ebola at my virgin immune system, I would be assailed by the pitiless, inexorable combo of food poisoning, and a group of 30 hyperactive French emo teenagers on a school trip to San Francisco.
I can’t decide whether I caught the horror from the dry, overpriced chicken sandwich I ate in the waiting lounge, or from the hindu meal I’d ordered instead of the expected usual in-flight Gault Millau fare, but there it was, 6 hours with my stomach in a gordian knot, being kicked incessantly by what seemed like five pubescent Parisians trying to have a steamy adolescent orgy in the seat row behind me (or just fighting over the video game controller.) Karin maintains it was the hindu meal (which wasn’t bad, aside from its obvious shortcomings) and that I’d pissed off one of the more vengeful avatars of Vishnu with my heathen presumption.
Remember before seat-back in-flight entertainment systems? Sometime during the flight, the stewardesses would come through the cabin and fasten the pull-down projector screens, at which point, if you were lucky, you got not one, but two films from the washed-out RGB overhead projector. If you were unlucky, the crew had partied particularly hard the night before departure and arrived late at the airport video library, leaving you stuck with two hours of The Gods Must be Crazy (if you’ve never heard an entire 747 groan, this is the ticket.)
Life could be worse.
